Dishonored – Review [GamingLives]

"In this day and age, having something truly different and new can be something of a rarity, and it’s for that reason that Dishonored has been oft-lauded; the promise of an ambitious first-person action-adventure where stealth is a premium and the end-game is possible to reach without killing a single person is one you’d be right to question. That Dishonored can and does exist in the current marketplace, and is backed by a wave of hype is nothing short of a modern miracle."

Actually, Edward actually enjoyed the hell out of Dishonored... for the most part. It won Game Of Show from our Editor-in-Chief at E3, then Game Of Show from Gamescom from Edward but when he came to play the game on a full playthrough rather than the thirty minutes or so that you get from a hands-on dev session, the flaws started to show.

It's a shame though, and you're right, that some people will read the score and automatically assume that it's a BAD game rather than reading the review to find out his reasoned approach to the score.

It's also bizarre that so few people recognise that 5/10 should be the score given to games which are "just okay" and anything beyond that means that it's generally a good game, in varying degrees. Getting 70% approval is a good thing, except in the games industry where it's seen as a bad score.

The point is... the review was written by someone who was heavily supportive of Dishonored, and still is, but prefers to be honest and objective rather than pander to publishers, developers and PR companies who all want 8+ scores.

This is not an attack on the review but rather a response to you in general.

Yes, what you mentioned is so prevalent on the gaming media it is almost impossible to determine what defines as "legit" reviews until read thoroughly. Unsurprisingly, it is the reviews that garner the most controversy that are usually observed from top to bottom but likewise a general consensus (positive) can have their reviews compared despite how informative they are.

Problem is, there is NO standard in review format. It has and always been a free-for-all mentality which makes it near impossible to criticize unless the review doesn't make sense at all. You don't know whether a 7 or a 5 can be mediocre because NOBODY cares to address it since it really all boils down to web hits.

Agree with you guys, and what I said above was not meant to be a direct attack at this review in particular, but more the idea that someone who does not like a particular game genre should be reviewing it if they can't be objective.. of course the truth is most reviews are never objective anyway..

it's just something that annoys me in general that I was picking on.

and the scoring of games is soo messed up, anything less then a 9 does seem to be classed as poor when really 5 should be average and anything below should be bad.

The score is well given,i finnish the game and thats the score i will give it!Also based more or less on the way you guys score games.The fact is that the majority of review sites have the score system broke for some reasons we all know and others that still lurk hide! 7/10 its a respectable score that in my book means that the game is good and a secure buy!

This review would be valid if a number of reviews had even remotely come close to the reviewers score, but they dont, NOT one! Thus making this review null and void, just a second rate gaming website trying to get page hits by being controversial.

Actually, we don't care about page hits. If we wanted page hits we'd be quote-mining interviews for misleading headlines like many other sites do. We'd not turn down so many press events that we know would get us easy traffic. We'd also be covering a lot more AAA titles than we do but, instead, we try to cover as many lesser-known titles as possible to give smaller developers and publishers more of a voice.

Is that how far we've come... that anyone with a differing opinion to others is automatically branded as a traffic whore or deliberately trying to be controversial? Sad, when you think about it.